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Introduction

• Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) is a complete suite of game development tools made by game
  developers, for game developers.
• From 2D mobile games to console blockbusters and VR
• Unreal Engine 4 gives you everything you need to start, ship, grow and stand out from the crowd.

Support for virtually every platform and SDK:

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History / Background

• Developed by Epic Games in 1988
• Unreal Engine is now FREE (March 2, 2015)
• Unreal takes a 5% cut after you ship and make $3000.
• UE4 introduced the new visual scripting Blueprint, successor to UE3's "Kismet"

Popular Games with UE4

• Unreal Tournament
• BioShock
• Gears Of War 4
• Street Fighter 5
• Kingdom Hearts 3
• Final Fantasy 7 Remake
• Ace Combat 7
• Dragon Quest 11
• Psychonauts 2

Blueprints

• Blueprints create less of a divide between technical artists, designers, and programmers.
• Visual scripting using nodes, drag and drop.
• Controls game logic

Examples:

• Health bar, taking damage
• Scripting events: haunted house with levitating objects
• Goals: check when a puzzle has been solved

Health and taking damage blueprint sample

Pros/Cons:

• Don't have to learn C++, but still have to learn blueprints
• Can't optimize code
• Can be 10x slower than C++, but only noticeable in heavy processing games

C++

• Setup a project in C++
• Ability to add C++ Classes
  • Choose a parent class
  • Create .h and .cpp files
  • Add components to give a class properties

C++ and Blueprints Together

• Programmers: C++
• Artists/Designers: Blueprint
• Blueprints can be used to extend C++ files and vice versa

Animation and Characters

1. Create Skeletal Mesh
2. Create Blend Animations
3. Create Animation Blueprint
   • Animation Graphs
   • Event Graphs

Skeletal Meshes

• Meshes are your character models
• They have a "rig" that can be animated
• Rigs can store multiple pre-made animations that are made for the rig

Blend Animations

• This is the way that Unreal blends two different animations together to create a seamless transition

Animation Blueprints

• There are two main parts to an Animation Blueprint:
  1. The AnimGraph
  2. The EventGraph
  3. Character Blueprint

The AnimGraph

• takes in all of your animations and the variables that will trigger them to activate
• place in various blend animations and different "states"

The EventGraph

• checks the status of the state and will update the animation
• checks if an event has happened and will trigger an updated state from the AnimGraph

Character Blueprints

• are the variables that are specific to your characters that you are using
• it will determine the camera view (First Person, Third Person etc)
• Hold key presses and will trigger events that will trigger animations

Camera View

• Create a camera for your character to be 1st person, 3rd person etc.
• Can be used to create racing games, endless runners, platformers, fighting games

Keyboard Inputs

• Control rotations
• Speed of movement
• Actions to take when a key is pressed

Networking

• Multiple players can enter an existing space by simply increasing the max player count
• Blueprints must be configured to replicate in order for events involving those objects to propagate to the server and clients.

Get Started with UE4!

• First steps to learning Unreal Engine 4 - https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/GettingStarted/
• Some video tutorials - https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Videos
• Unreal Engine Marketplace - https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace

Comparison to Unity

• Made to be more modular
• More flexible
• Networking is substantially easier to work with
• Less of a divide between programmers and artists/designers